In the News (Fri 18 Aug 17)

A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-to-word ratio.

It is more accurate to conceive of languages as existing on a continuum, with strictly isolating (consistently one morpheme per word) at one end and highly polysynthetic (in which a single word may contain as much information as an entire English sentence) at the other extreme.

Synthetic languages are numerous and well-attested, the most commonly cited being Indo-European languages such as German and Russian, virtually the entire Altaic superfamily (comprising Turkish, Mongolian and the Tungusic languages), the Uralic languages (including Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian) and Korean, as well as many languages of the Americas, including Navajo, Nahuatl, Mohawk and Quechua.

An agglutinative language is a form of synthetic language where each affix typically represents one unit of meaning (such as "diminutive", "past tense", "plural", etc.), and bound morphemes are expressed by affixes (and not by internal changes of the root of the word, or changes in stress or tone).

Agglutinative languages are not entirely grouped by the family (although Finnish and Hungarian are definitely related, as are possibly Japanese and Korean).

It is possible that convergent evolution had many separate languages develop this property, but there seems to exist a preferred evolutionary direction from agglutinative synthetic languages to fusional synthetic languages, and then to non-synthetic languages, which in their turn evolve again into agglutinative synthetic languages.

Nominative-absolutive language - Open Encyclopedia(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)

A nominative-absolutive language is one that marks the subject of a transitive verb or a voluntary subject of an intransitive verb distinctly from the object of a transitive verb or an involuntary subject of an intransitive verb.

For an intransitive verb, a subject who intentionally performs the action is marked with the nominative case, while a subject experiencing an action they have no control over is marked with the absolutive case.

Astrological Language in the Sepher Yetsirah Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation)(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)

Astrological language and conceptual structures are so deeply imbedded in Western thought that they are not recognized at all, though almost every scheme of classic or modern personality analysis is a derivative or partial mapping of astrological understanding.

Tripartite (Freudian) and quadrapartite (Jungian and Myer-Briggs) personality typologies can be mapped to astrology's more complex and dynamic system of seven impersonal energies in twelve active states of organization.

In the over-determined, analogical language of the Sepher Yetsira, Meadim is not "assigned" to the East, it is itself an energy-structure that describes man's relationship to his psychological (and often physical) future -- symbolized by the direction of the rising sun -- as based in resistance to life.

Though Tripartite Alliance Earth is a multilingual world, French is this world's lingua franca: Not only is the French language the prevailing language of wider communication in Europe, but France's long history of foreign colonial involvements and French culture prestige has implanted the French language in Africa, the South Pacific, and even North America.

Japanese is an important language in Asia and the Pacific, as it is the first language of 100 million Japanese citzens and spoken elsewhere in the region as a language of wider communication.

In the Southern Hemisphere, Portuguese is the language of Brazil, the single largest country in the world, of Portugal in southern Europe, and is increasingly a major language of wider communication in southern Africa beyond Lusophone Angola.

In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the general order of words in a language's sentences: "Sam oranges ate".

SOV languages tend to have the adjectives before nouns, to use postpositions rather than prepositions, to place relative clauses before the nouns to which they refer, and to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb.

SOV languages also seem to exhibit a tendency towards using a Time-Manner-Place ordering of prepositional phrases.

While the presents of some type of suprasegmental contrasts is considered conclusive at this early stage of the language, the phonetic nature of these contrasts still remains a matter of speculation.

It is language taught and used in the schools, the ones used by the media and the one used for government affairs.

Still other Tai languages such as Lue, Phuthai and Phuan are spoken as small speech islands in various parts of the country.

thaiarc.tu.ac.th /thai/thai.htm (1149 words)

The Electronic Polis(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)

While there are many dimensions to a language war, our concern here is for the specific contention over the notion of democracy in terms of an expressive idea(l), as well as a connotative set of values and institutions.

Language wars represent a semiotic resonance which provides a kind of vectoral or sonic scaffold for organizing and dissolving an infinitude of social and cultural elements.

Language wars are engaged, therefore in the formation of semiotic allegiances and social organizations, as well as counter-organizations (organized opposition), marginalities and the sensate or spontaneous agonisms that emerge through the conscious (art) or unconscious (everyday practices in life as lived) assault on standardized meaning authority.

The Convention calls for reconsideration of situations where existing language is dispositive and of situations as to which that language has been tailored to comply with domestic law, as well as of situations in which that language is not dispositive and relies on applicable law to supplement it.

Articles six and four of the Convention create a tripartite hierarchy in which the Convention lies at the bottom, the agreement of the parties is in the middle, and the domestic law on validity rests on top.

Prudent drafters ought to re-examine language for the international sale of goods, even when such language is dispositive, to protect the special needs of their clients in light of this new tripartite hierarchy.

Synthetic languages which are not agglutinative are called fusional languages; they sometimes combine affixes by "squeezing" them together, often changing them drastically in the process, and joining several meanings in one affix (for example, a single short verbal suffix means "past tense, perfect aspect, first person singular").

Examples of agglutinative languages are Uralic languages, Altaic languages, Korean, Dravidian languages, Inuktitut, Swahili, Malay, and some Mesoamerican languages including Nahuatl, Huastec, and Iran and the Ancient Near East also spoke such languages, like Sumerian, Elamite, Hurrian, Urartian, Hattic, Gutian, Lullubi, Kassite.

Agglutinative languages are not entirely grouped by the family (although Hungarian are related, as are possibly Japanese and Korean).

www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/Agglutinative (393 words)

The Great Wall of African American Vernacular English in the American College Classroom(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)

The pedagogy of pluralism asserts that all language varieties are equally effective in their communities and that language choice should therefore be made only by the user, not by the state or by its representative, the teacher.

It is a private language of one group, and neither the members of that group nor any other group feel comfortable with it as a public language.

The European American students would be learning the language, true; but they would be learning it in order to alleviate their ignorance about the culture from which it derives, and, initially at least, seldom for the purpose of entering that culture.

In other words, a cued language is any consonant-vowel language in which cuem, the visibly discrete symbols of Cued Speech, serves as the foundation for conveying wholly in the visible medium all of the features that constitute a language.

Thus, the terms Cued Speech and cued language are not interchangeable; the former refers to an articulatory system that produces visibly discrete symbols (cuem); the latter refers to the linguistic employment of that system.

Because cueing is a bipartite system and speaking is tripartite in nature, and because the relevant symbols (visible vs acoustic) and medium (light vs sound) differ, cued languages exhibit phonological processes distinct from those characteristic of spoken languages.

www.language-matters.com /difference.php3 (1332 words)

The Slovak Spectator - Slovakia's English Language Newspaper(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)

According to Lipšic and some other cabinet ministers, the labour unions that are part of the tripartite, along with the cabinet and the representatives of employers, misuse the law for their political goals and for unnecessary delays of legislation.

The tripartite law requires the cabinet to consult prepared laws with the labour unions and employers.

The head of the unions, Ivan Saktor, said to the Slovak daily SME that he did not believe that MPs would abolish the law, while Michal Ľach, president of the employers association, said that a new model of tripartite functioning could be introduced.

Analytic languages often express abstract concepts using independent words, while synthetic languages tend to use adpositions, affixes and internal modifications of roots for the same purpose.

Analytic languages tend to rely heavily on context and pragmatic considerations for the interpretation of sentences, since they don't specify as much as synthetic languages in terms of agreement and cross-reference between different parts of the sentence.

Chinese (of all dialects) is perhaps the best-known analytic language.

www.grohol.com /wiki/Isolating_language (607 words)

New Page 0(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)

The official language of the Community shall be English, Kiswahili shall be developed as a lingua franca of the Community.

The Secretary General shall conclude with the Governments of the Partner States in whose territory the headquarters or offices of the Community shall be situated, agreements relating to the privileges and immunities to be recognised and granted in connection with the Community.

The dissolution of the Tripartite Commission in terms of Article 139 of this Treaty shall not affect the decisions of the Tripartite Commission but such decisions shall be construed and implemented with such modifications, adaptations, qualification is and exceptions as may be necessary to bring them into conformity with this Treaty.

After providing a working model for the establishment of the tripartite symbiosis, the main objective of this thesis was to investigate whether the process is regulated by phosphorus.

Patterns of root accumulation of specific flavonoids and the extent to which early effects of the tripartite symbiosis would have at later periods of growth were evaluated over three experiments under controlled environmental conditions.

The root accumulation of the flavonoids daidzein, genistein and coumestrol diminished in response to the symbionts and N2 fixation was enhanced by the tripartite symbiosis.

On Tripartite Alliance Earth as on most other worlds, the prehistory of computing began with simple mechanical devices.

The wide variety of programming languages used by the different computers created an electronic "Tower of Babel," as organizations bought computers that were unable to talk to each other.

Although the Euronet remained active, the only significant development in Euronet technology was the invention by a Belgian informatics cooperative of creating memory banks attached to servers that would serve as a location to post permanent Euronet-based documents.

He is a member of PEN and of the German Academy for Language and Literature.

In Delius’ hands, language is indeed a dynamic form of speech that is shaped quite differently from work to work, according to the character and situation that he illuminates.

The first in this trilogy recreates the emphatically self-serving, tripartitelanguage of a highly-placed speech-writer; the second records the written stream-of consciousness recreation of five days of terror by a woman hijack victim; while the last includes, among several voices, the illuminating commentary of a dead terrorist.

www.dickinson.edu /departments/germn/delius.html (580 words)

[No title](Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)

Rather, it is an opportunity to ask a series of related questions that should serve to enhance our collective understanding of the tripartite curriculum, its strengths, and its deficiencies, and may lead towards the conclusion that the policy requires a more thorough assessment.

The term "tripartite" made its first formal appearance in Report 23 of the ASC (Liberal Studies in Polytechnic Education, February, 1977), in which the committee identified a curricular structure comprised of professional studies, liberal studies, and a third type of course that could not "be considered to fit exactly either of the [other] categories".

Out of Report 23 came the definitions of our tripartite curriculum that are still in place: Professional Studies: Studies that induce functional competence by presenting the knowledge and developing the skills characteristic of current practice in the career field.

It is conventionally believed that familiarity with the source and target languages, as well as the subject matter on the part of the translator is enough for a good translation.

The first is "discourse analysis," which mainly focuses on the structure of naturally occurring spoken language, as found in such "discourses" as conversations, commentaries, and speeches.

As a final word, we may say that in translation we should first try to reconstruct the macro-structure and rhetorical structure of the source text in the target language and then look for the appropriate words and structures; this is a procedure that skillful translators perform in the process of translation consciously or unconsciously.